When the Republican’s long-term plan to fuck public unions finally takes the Post Office down with it, we’re going to see reactions like “Technology made this inevitable”, “About time they started paying their way” and “Another symptom of America’s decline”. Case in point: The Hill’s stenography of Bob Corker’s “corporate welfare” talking points.
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Odie Hugh Manatee
The Hill has a narrative to weave. They had an article up the other day about Romney leading Obama among working women.
Yes, really.
File this under bullshit, then burn the filing cabinet and stand upwind of it.
c u n d gulag
Looks like I’ll need a little printing press and a good glue recipe for my self-made $75 stamps to get my bills mailed cross town.
Who needs the usps?
(Sorry, my “u” key doesn’t work, so I cut and paste that letter, and I don’t see a capital “u” I can snag).
gene108
Sigh…the company I work for does almost all our business on credit sales…
Our customers pay us via checks the mail to us. The slow down in postal delivery is killing us because it takes a few days longer to collect our money.
So you have to find ways to float bills that are due that much longer to make up for the slower cash flow.
MTiffany
If Teabagger types are such sticklers for the sanctity of the Constitution, perhaps they can direct me to the part of the Constitution which clearly states the US Postal Service must be a for-profit endeavor. All I can find is this: Article 1, Section 8, Clause 7.
Litlebritdifrnt
You know the dem messaging on this has been abysmal. How about some leading dem voices getting out there and reminding everyone that the USPS is the largest employer of military veterans in the country, and that cutting jobs there is going to devastate the military veteran employment rate at a time that everyone is supposedly “on board” with helping military veterans get jobs. I do not understand it.
cathyx
I’m glad I didn’t buy a lot of forever stamps. They’ll be called never stamps soon.
c u n d gulag
@Litlebritdifrnt:
LOL!
Dem’s message about as well bricks sing.
Mark S.
I don’t remember this bill at all in 2006. Was there a big stink back then, or was it passed quietly?
deep
@Litlebritdifrnt: The GOP doesn’t care about Veterans. They never have. They slander libruls for “spitting on soldiers” but then do nothing when the poor guys come home to PTSD and no jobs.
Fucking chicken hawks hate the soldiers even if they love the wars.
Flying Squirrel Girl (lurking since 2010)
@Litlebritdifrnt: Because the effort to kill the USPS has been bi-partisany.
GregB
Piece by piece they are dismantling this nation.
rlrr
@deep:
For example, Romney demonstrating in favor of the Vietnam war, but avoiding military service (IOKIYAR).
Zandar
The problem of course was that the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act was co-sponsored by one Rep. Henry Waxman, so yes, the bill sailed through Congress in December 2006 in about two weeks with zero complaint by a voice vote in the House. It passed the Senate by unanimous consent.
And the Post Office pretty much died that day without a whimper.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
I can’t wait for the howls from the rural people when they can no longer get mail delivered to them. UPS and FedEx normally don’t deliver to rural areas, they pay the USPS to do it.
Villago Delenda Est
@rlrr:
The deserting coward did that too. Made sure his dream sheet reflected “don’t want to leave the confines of CONUS”.
Then we have the further spectacle of Rmoney’s wastrel spawn “serving their country” not by risking their precious magical underwear covered asses in Iraq or Afghanistan, but by campaigning for their dad.
General Stuck
When I read stories like this, and add into it the coming world of Citizens United, there is no way to avoid the likely reality that we are in for a very dark period. The real effects of CU, won’t be directly related to elections, but behind the scenes slathering of politicians with all sorts of goodies for a vote for their particular industry bottom line. This will be the only marketplace that matters at some point, a giant flea market trading campaign cash later for more corporate welfare today. The Post Office is quasi government with government regulations that inhibit the sellout, along with a strong employee union, so it has to go to keep the largesse flowing freely rivers of cash for the plutocrats and their foot servants in congress. And democrats will either have to play this coked up corruption, or sit on the sidelines while the wingnuts take over everything but the shirt on your back, with proposed legislation to get that too.
Mark S.
@Zandar:
Unanimous consent? Wow, that would explain why I don’t remember reading anything about it at the time. Unbelievable.
jibeaux
There was a cartoon once, about how in the early days of the internets everyone was excited about “You’ve Got Mail!” and ignored their mailbox, and now everyone has more email than they know what to do with and gets excited about their mailbox. It’s true for me, anyway. I only check my mailbox once a day, and who knows, there might be a nice card in there or a baby announcement or something. I would be really sad if it started costing too much to send those and I got everydamnthing by email.
Zandar
@Mark S.: Yes, the THOMAS database tells the sad tale.
Villago Delenda Est
@jibeaux:
Most of the email is, not unlike the old fashioned mail, junk.
The war against spam has been won…by the spammers. It’s mainstream now, I get it from “legitimate” corporate outfits, not just from vile weasels like Sanford Wallace.
The cost of this is passed on to you, via your ISP fees. All this crap email costs something…CPU cycles, bandwidth, disk storage.
Zandar
In fact, in 2006, this bill was hailed as the key to saving the USPS.
jibeaux
@Villago Delenda Est: Ugh, I know. In my case, not just spam, too, but every vendor I have ever bought anything from ever in my life. I know I should set up a separate account for transactions, and I should go through and unsubscribe from notifications from the catalog I bought something from six years ago but almost all their stuff is too expensive for me, etc., but it’s too overwhelming now, and it’s all so intermingled. So I just have an email inbox full of unread messages.
RSA
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
And while more tech-savvy Teabaggers will say that everyone can just do business online, they’re forgetting that the U.S. government subsidizes phone and Internet service to rural areas via the Universal Service Fund, for about $9 billion per year.
Ash Can
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
I am so stealing this (and wishing I didn’t have as many occasions to use it as I do).
JPL
@Litlebritdifrnt: Military personnel stationed overseas depend on delivery by the post office.
Forum Transmitted Disease
Hey, that’s awesome.
Hey, even better, as usual, one of our own signing off on sticking the shiv in, giving the Republicans, media machine, plutocrats and Asshole Party plausible deniability.
“Both Sides Do It”
I’m finding it hard to combat that argument when it’s provably true. Yeah, there is a substantial difference in the degree of evil that either side is perpetuating; the Dems are just holding the gas can while the Republicans are setting old ladies on fire. But you have to admit that if we stopped holding the gas can it would be much harder for the Republicans to hunt down and round up those old people.
Maybe we should stop helping the Republicans dismantle America.
Yevgraf
When the USPS is shut down and mail delivery is profitized to the extent of about $2 per item, it will clearly be the fault of the nigra in the White House.
Bank it.
Villago Delenda Est
@RSA:
The teatards have no fucking idea about how expensive it is to maintain rural networks. Lots of wire, lots of poles, very little ROI. There’s a reason that there are small rural telephone companies…the old ILECS, totally mesmerized by short term profit, cherry pick the urban areas relentlessly, and ignore rural areas because, by the cold logic of ROI, they are far too expensive for them to be interested in.
Mark S.
@Zandar:
From that article, no wonder nobody gave a shit about it:
If that was the worst he could come up with, well, maybe the bill isn’t so bad. But I’m confused:
That doesn’t sound like what the bill ended up doing. Did something change?
bemused
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
And senior citizens! Hell hath no fury like pissed off seniors.
Yevgraf
@JPL:
UPS will do a fine job of delivering mail. It’ll just be pricier to send comfort shit to our tax paid corporate mercenary killbots (who are actually doing pretty well at E5 on up, considering the bloat on the tax-free BAH segment of pay). My tears won’t flow if Sgt Asshole has to pay extra to order the latest HD camera to upload torture/kill porn to the internet to send to his pals in order to prove what a badass he is.
I’m far more worried about the oldsters who do care about letters, birthday cards, holiday cards and actual printed mail. They’ll be completely cast adrift.
ellie
My sister is postmaster in a small town. The post office there is not just a post office, it is an informal meeting center. These small town conservatives want to shrink government but they have no clue that they will be affected as well. It is the most frustrating case of short-sightedness I have ever seen.
El Cid
With its Stalinist internatl equalitarian regulations, you get an awful lot of black people and other minorities working at the USPS, so it has to be dismantled. Those are people our taxes are paying, and they vote Democrat, so we need to get rid of this institution, so that we can get back to patriotically sharpening our knives to remove our noses so as to show our faces we mean business.
Interrobang
@Villago Delenda Est: This is another reason why I’m worried about incipient teabaggerism up here in Soviet Canuckistan. We’ve got 1/10 your population and more land area, so there are already substantial numbers of people who don’t get adequate service as it is. (We have areas up in the far north where communities don’t have addresses, they have map designations, because there are no roads in or out.)
Case in point, out in the prairie provinces, Greyhound convinced the provincial government to stop running its subsidized interurban bus service, on the grounds that if the province gave the subsidy to Greyhound instead, they could run the service more efficiently. I’ll give you three guesses about what happened, and the first two don’t count: Greyhound ran the service for a while, then decided that even with the provincial subsidies in place, there wasn’t enough profit in it for them, and stopped running intraurban service connecting the vast number of small towns with each other and the major cities.
And yet somehow, the idiot “don’ wanna pay taxes” faction keeps electing neocon dumbshits of both parties (Liberal and CRAP), and we’re currently circling the pipe as we speak.
Chris
@Villago Delenda Est:
Yeah, and not just with phones – isn’t that what accounts for why red states on average take in far more money than they get back? That’s what I always assumed – that as your state gets more and more rural, you have fewer and fewer people spread out over bigger and bigger distances paying for utilities, and at a certain point it’s just no longer profitable.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Ash Can:
Thanks, that’s one I actually came up with myself.
It’s getting easy nowadays. ;)
dedc79
One way in which teabaggery has infected the public discourse is the idea that government projects and public work projects must either be cost neutral or save money.
The Postal Service is called for in the Constitution – nowhere does it say that it has to be profitable. Yes, it would obviously be better if it wasn’t in the red on an annual basis, but one of the reasons we pay taxes is to fund this type of service. That’s not to say there isn’t room for changing the operation/management of the system – just that we shouldn’t expect it be a money maker no matter what we do.
The same is true for transportation projects (and particularly public transportation). That a high speed rail (or a subway system or even a highway) might net out to cost the government money is not a reason to block such a project. If we’d always followed that logic, we’d have no public tranporation in city’s like New York and Washington, that are what they are in part because of investment in public transportation infrastructure.
Forum Transmitted Disease
@Yevgraf: My “Sgt Asshole” buddies that I left behind in Africa are doing their damndest to keep their stateside kids and wives fed and housed, not buying a bunch of consumer electronics crap from the NEX. If they’re “doing pretty well” I’d hate to see what doing badly looks like.
I don’t know where you guys pull this military bashing shit from, but you should rethink that strategem. There’s only one community in this nation that has lived under fo’ real socia1ism, and it’s the military. And it works. Spectacularly.
They’ll back progressives to the hilt if you can stop using them as a punching bag and start looking for alliances.
McJulie
This is the perfect collision of two poisonous myths of right wing libertarianism: that you can dismantle/defund the infrastructure that brought us to the 21st century without losing anything, and that for-profit companies, left entirely to their own devices, will bring about the world they prefer.
They haven’t thought this through. It’s just a fanciful narrative they like (because it makes them feel all manly, or something). Government institutions are the bad guys and for-profit companies are the good guys. And I guess they figure that for-profit companies will do the good thing because they are the good guys… I’m never entirely clear on that part of it.
They worship Capitalism, but they don’t seem to understand how it works.
WWStBreitbartD
Because public unions make a Progressive Moonbat Paradise which protects and defends Law Enforcement misconduct.
Such as Lt. Pike The cop who pepper sprayed(using a Mk-9 military-grade riot-control pepper sprayer that is illegal for California cops to possess or use) the students at UC-Davis. He’s still on the job thanks to Public sector union protections from the Police Officer Bill of Rights.
Mike R
I live in a rural area, and it is very red and teabaggers are the norm. Recently our post office came up on the list of Offices to be reviewed for closure. It inspired a shit storm of protest and letter writing. With this crowd they don’t get it until they are on the wrong end of the stick. Problem with them they won’t remember who did what when they hit the voting booth.
deep
@rlrr: damn right!
Yevgraf
@Forum Transmitted Disease:
lolz
Villago Delenda Est
@Yevgraf:
Most of them will.
It’s interesting that people who have never served don’t get that the military is drawn from the larger society, and has a plethora of views on everything. Naturally, the MSM, being the bullhorn of the status quo, emphasizes that aspect of the military, but a lot of military people HAVE lived under a socia1ist system, and do have enough presence of mind to know that while it has flaws, it often works better for the majority than the dog eat dog Rmoney system.
Cole served. Soonergrunt served. Many commenters served. That doesn’t make them less progressive. For some, it makes them more so.
Forum Transmitted Disease
@Villago Delenda Est: What you said. If you haven’t been in, you have no idea. I expected, as does Yevgraf, a bunch of Sergeant Slaughter kill ’em all Nugent clones. I could not have been more wrong.
I met more of the kinds of folks who’d have no qualms about fragging Nugent than the kind who would like him, frankly. And yes, that includes officers.
Middlewest
@Villago Delenda Est: So they WANT to vote for a more progressive America, it’s just that snarky hippies hurt their feelings so damn bad they can’t get their hurt butts out the door on election day? Is that how it works?
dollared
OK, but once again, we do have a Democratic President who could use this as a perfect case example of why he is on the side of labor, is on the side of soldiers, is on the side of rural people, and on the side of government support of commerce throughout our great country.
This is when I really have to agree that he is a 1980s Republican. Because he is showing no courage, or even interest, on this issue.
dollared
@Forum Transmitted Disease: Moron. Give me one example of progressives bashing the military rank and file. One.
Forum Transmitted Disease
@dollared: Glad to help. Right upthread.
Not a helpful attitude. I see it rarely but it is still out there. That “Sgt. Asshole” shit pisses me off, non-coms make the world go round and I have yet to meet one who wasn’t anything but a decent human being.
You may apologize for calling me a moron at a time and place of your own choosing.
Will Reks
@Middlewest: There are more progressive types in the military than you might think. I was pretty happy to meet some fairly liberal ncos at my current post.